


young gods

by yoonbot (iverins)



Category: Stray Kids (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Coming of Age, M/M, Teen Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-27
Updated: 2018-12-27
Packaged: 2019-09-24 17:27:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17104958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iverins/pseuds/yoonbot
Summary: On the last day of break before their final year of high school, Hyunjin runs to the half-court line with Seungmin's old, slightly deflated basketball and says that if he makes the shot, Seungmin has to grant his wish.





	young gods

**Author's Note:**

  * For [riveting](https://archiveofourown.org/users/riveting/gifts).



> dearest recipient,
> 
> i want to apologize in advance... i initially wanted to write you gyuri fic, and then decided to write you hyunjin/minho fic, and then i ended up going with the lowest-hanging fruit which was hyunjin/seungmin high school au... i hope that even though this fic turned out 3x longer than it should've been, you enjoy it and that it makes your holiday season a little brighter!! ♡♡♡ 
> 
> a big thank you to mod for running another round of nuguseyo!!!
> 
>  
> 
> and special thanks to **s.** for holding my hand during my last minute panic and helping me with skz meta. the best friend and stray mum ♡

On the last day of break before their final year of high school, Hyunjin runs to the half-court line with Seungmin's old, slightly deflated basketball and says that if he makes the shot, Seungmin has to grant his wish.

"Alright, alright," Seungmin laughs. He's standing next to the hoop, tiny and far away when set against the navy of dusk, hands on his knees. "I'll do it."

Hyunjin closes an eye, aiming. "No takebacks!" he calls out, dribbling the ball a couple times for good measure, the wheeze of it hitting the concrete lost as a truck thunders down the road next to the park. "You better keep your promise, Kim Seungmin, or I'm telling your mom!"

Seungmin shakes his head. "We both know." Hyunjin aims and fakes once. "That she likes _me_ more – " Hyunjin aims and fakes twice.

And then he jumps, throwing all his strength into it. The basketball soars, clangs against the backboard.

And with the swish of the net, it goes in.

 

 

 

 

Hyunjin often thinks like this:

A Hyunjin without a Seungmin is like _gamjatang_ without the soup, or Pororo without the helmet and goggles. It wouldn't be bad if you didn't know what these things were supposed to be like originally, but once you did, there was something universally wrong about the alterations.

Using this logic: for the first time in two years, Hyunjin and Seungmin are in different classes. Hyunjin's quadruple-checking the rosters for their names when Seungmin sighs, “Well, that's unfortunate.” It makes it all the more real, hearing it aloud.

Unfortunate's an understatement. “Yeah,” Hyunjin echoes, deflated. The school bell’s about to ring, and he lets himself be lost in the wave of latecomers, desperately trying to find their own class assignments.

Seungmin gives him a close-mouthed smile. “Hey, it’s not so bad,” he promises. “I’ll come to your classroom for lunch, okay? My mom gave me an extra pack of Pringles that we can share.”

Hyunjin laughs at that, remembering Seungmin’s mom chasing him down the stairs earlier that morning, stuffing the can into his backpack as Seungmin whined. “It’s your last year of high school!” she’d argued. “There’s only so many more lunches I'll get to pack for you!” And after pinching a begrudging Seungmin’s left cheek, she turned to pinch Hyunjin’s. He’d leaned into it, obliging her.

“Call!” Hyunjin grins, disappointment almost forgotten. Seungmin takes off to the opposite side of the hallway from Hyunjin’s classroom and waves before disappearing past the door, just as the bell rings.

 

 

 

 

High school has always been: Seungmin waiting outside his door as Hyunjin’s pulling on his shoes. Their footsteps thundering down seven flights of concrete steps, slowing in tandem as they cross the overpass or blurring together to chase after the bus. Hyunjin always catches the driver before they pull away from the curb and waits for Seungmin, who’s never been as good at sprinting as he was at taking notes and studying. He’d help Hyunjin with his homework after school in their classroom, or in the library when Hyunjin started to nod off after being stuck on the same math problem, or at one of their tiny dining tables, squished into the corner of the small kitchen in their apartment’s mirrored layouts, the dim kitchen lights turning the textbook pages yellow and old.

A few days before their end-of-the-year exams, Hyunjin ran to the cafeteria at the sound of the lunch bell and returned triumphantly with two of Seungmin’s favorite breads, the kinds that were usually sold out by the time he’d get there himself.

“I thought your mom made you lunch,” Seungmin said, wary as Hyunjin handed him the bag before flopping down onto his desk, over his English book.

Hyunjin grinned. “She did,” he replied. His sweaty cheek stuck to one of the pages. “But you’re studying for the TOEFL.” Which meant that at around ten at night, Hyunjin’s desk smushed next to Seungmin’s and the print of his own workbook swimming in his vision, Seungmin’s stomach would start growling.

“That doesn’t change anything,” Seungmin frowned, attempting to flatten out the papers that had crinkled under Hyunjin’s weight. Hyunjin shrugged and offered Seungmin a _gimbap_ from the tupperware his mom had packed for him.

It does, actually, change everything. Hyunjin doesn’t realize this until he wakes up from where he’d pressed his head against his textbook and sees Seungmin packing up his things. “Where are you going?” he whispers as Seungmin’s slowly dragging the zipper of his backpack, tooth by excruciating tooth, in his best attempt of silence. The sun’s just barely started to go down.

“I have _hagwon,_ remember?” Seungmin tilts his head. He puts an arm through one of his backpack straps. “My mom signed me up for it over the holiday.”

“Oh.” Now that he thinks about it, Hyunjin recalls watching the corners of Seungmin’s mouth twitch downward when he’d told him about it last week. He feels careless for forgetting. “Oh yeah.”

Seungmin pushes his head with his index finger. “Silly,” he smiles. Hyunjin sticks his tongue out in a weak attempt at retaliation. “I left you my math notes since you fell asleep before I could help you. Don’t wait up for me to study when you get home, okay?”

“Mmm,” Hyunjin hums, picking up his pencil again. There’s a golden cut-out of the setting sun against Seungmin’s cheek from where he’s standing. “I’ll see you later.”

Halfway out of the classroom, Seungmin suddenly stops, turns back, and unzips his backpack hastily, plunking the half-full can of Pringles next to Hyunjin’s pencil case. “You can finish them,” he says. “And don’t forget to move the desks back before you leave!”

“I know, I know!” Hyunjin laughs after him. One of Seungmin’s classmates glares at him pointedly before turning up the volume of her music. Hyunjin tries his best to look apologetic.

Two hours later, brows furrowed over the last problem in his homework set, he turns to Seungmin’s seat, question on his tongue. The Pringles stare back at him instead. It’s then that Hyunjin realizes how much of a stranger he feels sitting amongst Seungmin’s new classmates at a makeshift, pushed-together desk, one seat vacated.

He packs up earlier than usual and finishes the Pringles on the overpass, staring at the headlights of passing cars. It’s the first night Hyunjin takes the bus home, alone.

 

 

 

 

Here’s a visceral idea: each Korean high school student is on the dangerous precipice between making it through the primary education system alive and falling into a deep, dark pit on the other side. And that in order to maintain this balance, Hyunjin thinks everyone’s found comfort in some mundane habit, helping them depressurize.

Chaewon, Felix’s twin sister, is the kind of person who numbers down the days until each relevant high-school-life event and pencils in the countdown on her planner in corresponding colors. She updates Hyunjin about it every morning when he slides into his seat in front of her, and it’s the most they talk, apart from when she hisses at him to move his head so she can see the board.

Felix is in Seungmin's class this year. He and Chaewon had moved from Australia last year, and Hyunjin used to hear them arguing in between classes from where they sat, across the room from him. But when he's in the bathroom during lunch and Chaewon's passing by their classroom, giggling at something her friend said, Seungmin presses his lips together in thought before asking: “Would you date Chaewon?”

Hyunjin blinks. “All of a sudden?” he laughs. Seungmin shrugs and sips the extra banana milk Hyunjin found in his lunchbox. “Why?”

“Just,” Seungmin starts. And then he shrugs again.

“No way,” Hyunjin says, shoveling a spoonful of rice into his mouth. “It’d be like dating Felix,” he makes a face, “and I don’t wanna date _Felix._ ”

Seungmin cracks up at that. They're still laughing about it when Felix comes back from the bathroom, and Hyunjin chokes when he asks why.

Felix was technically Seungmin's friend first. Some days he'd sit with Seungmin and Hyunjin at the library, only asking Seungmin for equivalent words in English when the translation app on his phone failed him. Other days, on the weekends, Hyunjin would be pushed against the wall of Seungmin’s kitchen, the dining table crammed with all three of their textbooks.

“Do you think I'll become a fluent English speaker at this point?” Hyunjin joked once, feeling left out as they crowded over Felix's textbook across from him, whispering to each other in a conversation that Hyunjin couldn't follow.

Seungmin looked up. And then his face had split into an open-mouthed grin. “Yeah,” he teased. “You'll pass the TOEFL for sure.” Felix laughed when Hyunjin threw his eraser at Seungmin's face.

“Does Chaewon like to tell you how many days we have left until the _suneung,_ too?” Hyunjin asks Felix when they’re walking out of school together. It’s on one of the days Seungmin’s left early for _hagwon,_ but the sun’s already long disappeared. The bright lights from the classrooms illuminate the pavement before them a pale kind of dark.

Felix tips chip crumbs into his mouth. “Oh,” he says, mouth full. “Yeah, she loves that kind of thing. Drives me nuts.” He balls up the empty bag in his hands and it makes this synthetic crinkling noise that Hyunjin knows Seungmin hates. “I think it means she probably doesn’t hate you, though. Want me to tell her to stop?”

Seungmin would like that kind of thing, too. From the color coordination to the neatly handwritten checklist of daily to-do items. He’d bought Hyunjin a planner for his birthday when they first became friends at the start of high school, and Hyunjin had disappointed him by only managing to use it for two weeks. “Nah,” Hyunjin says. He holds out his hand and Felix gives him the crumpled up chip bag. “I guess it’s nice of her.” He spins and makes a jump shot. The bag hits the rim of the trash can.

Felix laughs at that. It’s the same laugh he’d given Hyunjin when he’d called him by his Korean name on accident, even after Felix told him not to. “Seungmin’s busy these days, huh?” he sighs, reaching down to pick up the piece of trash. “I feel like if we weren’t in the same class, I’d never see him anymore.”

Some part of Hyunjin’s chest goes tight. He breathes in, then breathes out, but the sensation persists. “He’s trying to get into SNU.” It comes out lighter than he thought it would. “Of course he’s gotta be busy.”

“You’re right,” Felix agrees. Hyunjin dismisses the feeling as a hunger pain. It’s past dinner time, after all.

 

 

 

 

Seungmin’s eyes have always distinctly reminded Hyunjin of the color of soy sauce.

It’s a weird thought to have when Hyunjin’s got a math exam on Monday to study for, but it’s always been like this between the two of them: every now and then, Hyunjin peers up from his textbook to look at Seungmin, only to find Seungmin’s soy sauce eyes meet his own. And then they smile at each other before turning back to their work.

Hyunjin also thinks it’s weird how you can see someone everyday and still miss them. It’s weird because Hyunjin’s mom used to joke that he and Seungmin used to spend every waking minute together ever since Seungmin’s family moved into the apartment across from theirs, weird because he and Seungmin still spend this time studying together on the weekend, where Seungmin helps Hyunjin with Calculus in the place of listening to practice passages for the TOEFL. Instead he plays them while he’s lying in bed before falling asleep, and Seungmin keeps joking it knocks him right out.

“Hyunjin,” Seungmin says. Hyunjin blinks. Seungmin’s waving his hand in front of Hyunjin’s face, smiling open-mouthed. “Hello, anyone in there?”

Hyunjin starts to swat him away, thinks twice, and then catches Seungmin’s hand and pretends to bite it. “That’s what you get,” he mock-threatens when Seungmin yelps. Hyunjin laughs at him for a bit, Seungmin shaking his head, before trying to solve the problem he’d been stuck on again.

It’s been uncharacteristically cold for a spring. Four weeks ago, the first day of it was earmarked as _Hyunjinnie’s birthday!_ on Seungmin’s planner, and he’d opened his front door at midnight to a grinning Seungmin holding up a slice of cake, the flame on the candle flickering bright in their otherwise dark apartment hallway.

“Make a wish!” he’d whispered, both their parents already asleep. Hyunjin did, closed his eyes, and then blew out the candle.

“You know,” he said to Seungmin as they shared the cake sitting on the concrete steps of the stairwell, the flashlight on Hyunjin’s phone the only light in the darkness. “You still owe me a wish for my half-court shot.”

Seungmin feigned innocence. “Do I?” He laughed, fending off Hyunjin trying to smear frosting onto his face as payback. “It’s not like anyone else saw it go in, right?” They only quieted down when the ahjumma from upstairs told them that staying up late would rot their brains, but Hyunjin went back to his homework feeling full and happy.

 _What if I wished,_ he started to type out on his phone later that night. _That we’d go back to how things were before this year?_ And then he ended up backspacing it all, turning off the lights in his room, and staring at his slowly-clarifying ceiling in the dark as his eyes adjusted, unable to fall asleep.

And Hyunjin’s always been well-aware that at some point in time, somewhere in the near future, he’d finally have to grow up. He just never imagined it’d have to be all at once, or that it’d have to do with Seungmin sitting across from him and realizing that next year, he wouldn’t be anymore.

“Hyunjin,” Seungmin repeats. He’s put his pencil down, and there’s concern in his soy sauce colored eyes when Hyunjin looks up to meet them this time. “Hyunjin, you’re crying.”

“Oh.” He wipes at his eyes. There’s a damp spot on the sleeve of his hoodie when he looks at it. “It’s just – I just – ” He tries to press the tear stains on his textbook pages dry. “Calculus is so _hard._ ”

Seungmin laughs at that. It sounds a little watery, too, and for all that Seungmin always teased him for being easily moved to tears, he wasn’t that much better. “I know,” he says. He hands Hyunjin a few crumpled tissues from his backpack. “But you haven’t cried over Calculus since last year.”

Hyunjin blows his nose. “I,” he hiccups, inhales. And just when he thinks he’s caught his breath, everything comes spilling out all at once. “I’ve just been thinking about how things will be different next year. How you’ll be at SNU, and you’ll have a bunch of new friends, and you’ll be this cool Kim Seungmin who doesn’t have time for me anymore.” He wipes his tears with his sleeve again. “And I know we see each other everyday, but you have _hagwon_ and you’re busy and…” He exhales shakily. “I wanted to be the cool Hwang Hyunjin who supported you silently from the side like a good friend, but I,” he sniffs. “I’m sorry.”

Seungmin reaches for his hand, the one balled up in the hoodie sleeve he’s been wiping his tears on. “How am I ever going to be _cool Kim Seungmin_ when you have that video of me trying to dance?” he says. It makes Hyunjin cough out an ugly kind of choked up and tear-filled laughter.

“And don’t be sorry,” Seungmin continues. “I’m happy you’re telling me how you feel.” Hyunjin looks pointedly at the tears running down Seungmin’s cheeks. Seungmin just shakes his head. “And I hope you know that you’re never going to be able to get rid of me now. We’re going to be friends for so long that you’ll be sick of my face, but I’ll still show up at your doorstep.”

Hyunjin laughs a little, imagining how dumb they both look, crying over their textbooks, Seungmin holding his hand across the table. “Promise?” he asks, sucking in a deep breath.

Seungmin grins back, tears and a Seungmin-kind of earnestness sparkling in his soy sauce eyes. “I promise.” And his hand is so, so warm over Hyunjin’s.

 

 

 

 

For all that Hyunjin tries to hold onto each moment, the first semester of his third year in high school flies by.

There’s these: Felix buying him snacks at the convenience store across from the bus stop as a last-minute birthday present, Chaewon poking his shoulder with the end of her pen to update her countdown and wish him a good summer break all using the same breath, Hyunjin getting the highest score he’s ever gotten on a math exam in May and Seungmin buying him milk tea to celebrate. Hyunjin walking in for his university counselling and, though it went well, walking out teary-eyed anyway, Seungmin laughing and calling him a crybaby through his hug. And even though having to study Calculus for hours on end always seemed to drag on for all but eternity, Hyunjin’s never felt the idea of time passing through your fingers like grains of sand more acutely than he does now.

“What’re you doing over the break?” Felix asks him and Seungmin as they’re walking to the bus stop on their last day before summer vacation. While Chaewon’s staying behind to study, Felix’s going to Australia for two weeks. “Other than holing yourself up at the library all day,” he laughs as Seungmin’s about to open his mouth.

“Oh, you know,” Hyunjin shrugs, speaking for him instead. “Hang out with me. Same old, same old.” He feigns disinterest.

Seungmin slings his arms around Hyunjin’s shoulders. “Oh, come on! You _love_ hanging out with me,” he insists right into his ear. “You never leave me alone during break!”

Hyunjin pretends to move to kiss Seungmin on the cheek. Seungmin leans away but keeps his arms looped around his shoulders, and he can feel Seungmin’s laughter vibrating against his skin from where their chests are still pressed together. Felix just shakes his head, smiling, “Why am I even friends with you two?”

On the second day of their summer break, Felix is on an airplane and Seungmin and Hyunjin are back at the basketball court in the park behind their apartment building. “You know,” Hyunjin brings up as he lazily shoots some hoops. “You still have to grant my wish.”

“It’s not like you ever let me forget,” Seungmin says. He’d gotten a haircut the day before, and Hyunjin thought it made his ears stick out and his soy sauce eyes all the more apparent. “It’s cute,” Hyunjin’d said when Seungmin had frowned, pulling his hood back over it. Seungmin blushed at the compliment and then proceeded to steal the last piece of chicken from him.

Hyunjin grins. “Of course,” he replies, passing Seungmin the ball. Seungmin throws it in the general direction of the hoop from where he’s sitting on the bench and laughs when Hyunjin has to chase after it.

And for all that the rest of the year had been so different previous two, summer break’s exactly the same. They run from one air-conditioned space to another, eat too much ice cream, and lug back swollen watermelons from the supermarket that Seungmin’s mom unfortunately allows them to cut as “older and wiser third years,” the juice spilling out from the countertop to the floor and creating a diluted blood-red crime scene.

All that’s really changed can be narrowed down to: the extra hours they spend at the library hunched over their textbooks, Seungmin taking TOEFL practice tests on Saturday mornings, and the feeling of something blooming in his chest when he looks over at Seungmin as they walk home together, like a seed germinating and sprouting from the soil to see the sun for the first time.

Seungmin’s a lot of things. Seungmin’s the kid whose family moved into the apartment across from his right before they started high school, and, upon learning that when Hyunjin’s mom had given them a house-warming gift, has waited outside Hyunjin’s door before leaving for school every morning, at the expense of having to run for the bus. The kind of smart that aces all his subjects, that knows how to solve the trickiest questions in the mock-tests, that’ll smile and patiently explain answers to anyone who asks.

And Seungmin’s the friend that’ll let Hyunjin’s tears soak the shoulder of his new t-shirt as they sit in the stairwell, listening to Hyunjin’s fears about university and Calculus and the _suneung_ Chaewon keeps counting down to, and how after all that, he’ll tell Hyunjin “I understand.” And when Hyunjin looks up from where he’d been leaning his head, he'll glance at an upturned corner of Seungmin’s mouth and realize he wants to press his lips against it, and that maybe he’s wanted this want for a while now.

It's not like Seungmin’s the first person Hyunjin’s ever liked. But Seungmin’s the first person that he’s afraid to admit his feelings for, and the words that he usually can say without much thought, get rejected over, cry about and then move on, just keep getting swallowed down until Hyunjin thinks he’ll get a stomachache.

It’s almost a relief when Felix comes back. Hyunjin’s never breathed easier crammed up against the wall of Seungmin’s kitchen again, squinting over Calculus problems.

“You know how in those American movies,” Seungmin starts one night after they’ve walked Felix to the bus stop and bought ice cream to eat on their way home. “How high schoolers never want summer to end?”

The lights on the overpass stick to the both of them like honey. Hyunjin stuffs the rest of his popsicle in his mouth, face scrunching at the brain freeze. “Yeah,” he says.

Seungmin laughs. “I never really understood why. I mean, I _like_ going to school.” He mimics the expression Hyunjin makes at him for admitting that. “But this summer, I think I get it.”

He looks down at his shoes. “I’m scared of the future, too. And it’s not like I don’t want it to happen, but.” Seungmin presses his lips together, making his mouth small, like he does when something’s serious. “Sometimes I just wanna be trapped in a moment of time. Like right now, with you.” His soy sauce eyes meet Hyunjin’s. “Even if August is hot and the cicadas are noisy and we’ve got so much summer homework left to do.”

Hyunjin stops walking. Seungmin stops walking. A vacuum of time-space, other than the faint whirring of cicadas, the swell of cars passing by underneath them, and the gurgling of Hyunjin’s stomach, trying to speak the words his tongue won’t. They climb up his throat as Seungmin just stands there, looking at him, and it’s this:

“Kim Seungmin.” Pause. “I like you.” Full stop.

And then, like pressing play on a paused movie, everything is suddenly spurred back into motion. Seungmin’s brows furrow. The power line overhead buzzes. The red tail lights of cars gather, waiting for the traffic signal to tell them to go. “I – I just.” His fingers tighten around the popsicle stick. “You don’t have to answer. I mean, you can just forget this ever happened. I – I'm sorry.”

“Hyunjin.” Seungmin’s voice goes tiny and far away. “Hyunjin.” Because Hyunjin’s running as fast as his legs can carry him, his heart on overdrive.

It’s not until he’s shut the door of his room behind him that Hyunjin realizes he’s still clutching the popsicle stick like some sort of lifeline. He sits down, draws his knees to his chest, and breathes.

 

 

 

 

The rest of summer break passes like this:

“Hyunjinnie,” his mom says the next day, when he’s still in bed at noon. “Seungmin’s waiting for you.”

Hyunjin buries himself further into his sheets. “I don’t feel well.” He fakes a cough. “I think I ate a bad ice cream or something. I’ll see him tomorrow.”

He doesn’t. Or the day after that, or the day after that. The last week before his last semester of high school slips by quietly with Hyunjin sweating at his desk, frowning over the summer homework he doesn’t want to do, penciling in answers that seem vaguely correct in place of asking Seungmin for help.

“Did you guys fight or something?” Felix asks on their first day back at school. Hyunjin’s eating lunch at his own desk for once, and Felix slides into Chaewon’s vacated seat behind him. “Seungmin’s actually listening to his TOEFL passages.”

Hyunjin shrugs. He shifts in his chair and offers Felix the extra banana milk he usually gives Seungmin, ignoring the pang in his heart. “Look, I don’t know what happened,” Felix tells him before he’s shooed away by Chaewon, who slaps him on the shoulder for high-jacking her desk. “But can you two just make up?”

Hyunjin just shrugs again. Felix sighs as he walks back to his classroom and Chaewon just looks at them both, confused.

It’s surprisingly easier to avoid Seungmin once the rhythm of school picks up again. He leaves before Seungmin stands outside his door, doesn’t move over to Seungmin’s classroom once the bell rings, pushing an extra chair to sit beside him, and studies at his own kitchen table in an old t-shirt, washed so many times the collar’s fraying, the fan focused on him at full blast. Seungmin doesn’t come home until late from _hagwon_ and Hyunjin crosses the overpass running more often than not, the spot where he’d stamped out his heart for Seungmin to see blurring like the tail lights of cars gathering at a traffic signal.

Because it’s easier to choke down the rest of his feelings when he doesn’t have to sit across from Seungmin, looking up every now and then to meet his soy sauce eyes, smiling before looking back down at his textbook. It’s easier to accept that Seungmin doesn’t feel the same way when he spends hours over his Calculus homework, working at it long enough that he figures out how to solve the problem by himself, and easier knowing that Seungmin can focus on the TOEFL without Hyunjin in the way, holding him back from the world.

It’s easy until one Saturday in late September, the sunset pooling into the hallway outside their apartments, Hyunjin sees Seungmin coming up the stairs he’s about to go down, and there’s nowhere to hide.

“Hyunjin!” Seungmin calls as he tries to run back into his apartment, catching the sleeve of Hyunjin’s hoodie. “We need to talk.”

Hyunjin looks down at Seungmin’s fingers on his sleeve. It’s the same hoodie Hyunjin wore that time he cried, and Seungmin’s still looking at him with a kind of earnestness sparkling in his soy sauce colored eyes. “I told you,” he starts, stiffly. Seungmin doesn’t let go and Hyunjin’s never been more acutely aware of how he’s going to break his heart. “That you don’t need to answer – ”

“But I want to,” Seungmin interrupts. Hyunjin glances up, caught off-guard. Seungmin takes a step closer, climbing a stair. “And you never even let me finish talking, and then you ran away,” he shakes his head, a close-lipped smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. “And then you _avoided_ me.”

“You avoided me too!” Hyunjin says, feeling tears prick his eyes. There’s a pressure burning at the bridge of his nose. “You avoided me too,” he repeats, softer this time.

The smile slips off Seungmin’s face, his mouth settling into a small line in seriousness. “Just,” he sighs. Presses his lips together again. “I thought you needed time.”

 _What I need is you,_ Hyunjin wants to say. He doesn’t. Seungmin takes another step forward, and now his face is so close that Hyunjin could count every one of his eyelashes if he wanted to. “I mean,” Seungmin continues, looking down at his shoes. “ _I_ needed time,”. He lets go of Hyunjin’s sleeve. Hyunjin doesn’t run. “Because I want to keep my promise about being friends until we’re old and I don't know if what I'm going to say changes that. But.” He clears his throat. “But now I’m going to answer you, okay?”

“Okay,” Hyunjin says, feeling his heart pounding, hummingbird wing quick, in his fingertips. And in this moment, it’s like the entire world holds its breath –

“I like you too, Hwang Hyunjin.”

– And releases it, to the press of Seungmin’s lips against his own.

 

 

 

 

Hyunjin and Seungmin:

Run to the bus stop in the mornings, the dirty imprints of their shoes marking every step they take on the bus. Hyunjin laughs when Seungmin splashes right into a puddle while crossing the street and Seungmin chases him all the way to his class.

Spend their afternoons sitting next to each other again, Seungmin waking Hyunjin up from his unintended naps before heading off to _hagwon_. “I’m so glad you guys made up,” Felix tells him as they’re walking home one night. “I thought I was gonna eventually have to choose a side.”

“You would’ve chosen me, right?” Hyunjin grins. “ _Right?_ ” Felix pretends the arm he slings around his shoulder weighs ten times more than it actually does.

Sit across from each other at Hyunjin’s dining table during weekends in October, Hyunjin quizzing Seungmin with flashcards. And, after Hyunjin cracks open his own textbook, he reaches for Seungmin’s hand underneath the table whenever their eyes meet every now and then, giving it a reassuring squeeze.

Meet the morning before Seungmin goes to take the TOEFL, barely missing each other. Hyunjin, who’d stayed up the late the night before, runs down the stairs and calls Seungmin’s name from all the way down the street. And then he flings his arms around Seungmin, whispering _you’ll do great, I believe in you_ into his ear. Seungmin hugs him back tight enough that Hyunjin can feel his heart beating against his chest.

Study and study and study. Chaewon’s countdown hits ten, and then single digits. “Good luck,” she tells Hyunjin the day before, poking him in the shoulder with the end of her pen for what he realizes will probably be the last time. It makes him unnecessarily sad for a moment before he smiles back and tells her the same.

Eat breakfast together the day of _suneung,_ their moms silent other than urging them to have more rice. “You always do well,” Hyunjin’s mom tells him before she sends him out the door. “No matter what the score.” And Hyunjin almost cries right there but holds himself together enough to board the bus with Seungmin, the both of them perfectly on time for once.

Seungmin smiles at him as the bus bumps along, the both of them facing each other from where they’re gripping the handrails. “So, SNU, huh?” he teases. Hyunjin punches him in the shoulder.

Nine hours and the test of their lifetimes later, Hyunjin feels so light that he could float up to the clouds like a balloon and touch the face of the sun. He kisses Seungmin in the stairwell of their apartment and lets himself unabashedly and fearlessly fall head-first into love.

Go to the movies with Felix during winter break, settling for a cartoon that Hyunjin picks after winning a game of rock-paper-scissors. Seungmin watches the screen and Hyunjin watches Seungmin, but he can’t really say it was a waste of money when he smiled the whole time anyway.

Celebrate when their test results come out. Hyunjin’s done well and Seungmin’s out-of-this-universe levels of stellar, and Hyunjin smiles so hard that his cheeks hurt instead of letting the thought of their impending separation gnaw through Seungmin’s happiness.

Lay in Seungmin’s bed talking, side-by-side, instead of studying for the last exams they’ll take in high school ever. “I still haven’t forgotten,” Seungmin’s saying with a laugh, turning his head to look at Hyunjin. “That I owe you a wish for that basketball shot.”

Hyunjin shifts so that he’s lying on his side, Seungmin’s face so close that it’s all Hyunjin can see. There’s a silence so intimate between them that Hyunjin’s afraid he’ll never feel this close to anyone else ever again in his life.

“I’m in love with you,” he whispers, slightly terrified, only for Seungmin to hear. “I’m really, really in love with you.”

Seungmin doesn’t have to kiss him. Seungmin doesn’t have to hold him tight, or recite a monologue professing his feelings for him, or do anything but turn onto his side, too, and reach for Hyunjin’s hand. “Me too,” he whispers back. And maybe it’s just Hyunjin’s wishful thinking but he hears that same fear in Seungmin’s voice, sees it mirrored back to him in Seungmin’s soy sauce colored eyes. “I’m in love with you too.”

And Hyunjin doesn’t know if he’ll ever be capable of loving someone else like this, this strongly, with every bit of his being, again. That’s really all it takes.

 

 

 

 

They graduate.

The ceremony’s not lackluster by any means but passes by so quickly in comparison to the years Hyunjin spent hunched over in his seat, studying, that it feels strange. Strange in the way that Hyunjin can see his and Seungmin’s parents in the stands, smiling when he walks past, strange in the way that Hyunjin, unsurprisingly, starts crying when they gather back in their classrooms to take pictures together and Seungmin and Felix laugh at him with tears in their own eyes.

Felix is going back to Australia, after winning a long fight with his parents about taking a gap year. “I mean, we’re so young,” he said when he’d first told him and Seungmin. “Maybe I want to go to uni in Australia. Maybe I want to go to uni here.” He laughed then. “I don’t really know yet.”

“I’m going to bother you so much,” Hyunjin blubbers into Felix’s hug. “So much. I’m gonna call you every day.”

Felix wipes his tears on the back of his sleeve. “Okay,” he grins. “You do that.”

Chaewon, on the other hand, is going to Ewha. “Congratulations, Hyunjin,” she’d told him on the last day they’d sat in their seats, smiling.

“Thanks,” he’d said, wanting to tell her how much he’d appreciated her counting down the days to the _suneung_ and this moment, but finding himself unable to put the feeling into words. “You too.” And he’d smiled back.

Hyunjin himself is going to university in Incheon. It’s a good hour away from Seoul by train, which is “Perfect,” according to his mom. “You better come back more than once a month,” she told him as she took over ironing his uniform for the ceremony, clicking her tongue at his own attempt. His dad had copiously piled more food into his bowl that night.

And Seungmin, Seungmin’s going to SNU. “As expected!” Felix had roared when he told him the news at a coffee shop, throwing his arms around him. “Our smart Seungminnie’s made it!”

The three of them had laughed at that. And amidst it all, Seungmin’s soy sauce eyes met Hyunjin’s, and his world stopped for that fleeting moment.

But as physics dictates, the world actually keeps spinning and spinning and spinning until they’re done taking pictures of Hyunjin’s crying face on each of their phones, their parents coming to meet them, and then Seungmin and Hyunjin are taking the same route home from their high school one last time, for “nostalgia’s sake.” Their families let them have this.

The bus ride is quiet. It’s quiet because Hyunjin wants to remember everything for all that it is, wants to catalogue every bump in the road, stop light, and honking car until it’s so engraved in his memory that he can close his eyes and be transported back to this exact moment in time. Seungmin doesn’t break the silence, but at the stop before theirs, he twines his fingers with Hyunjin’s, his palm warm even in the heated interior. It’s comfortable. It’s good.

This is the last, Hyunjin keeps thinking. _Of what_ is the idea his thoughts keep looping around. Of: walking home from school together. Of wearing their uniforms. Of them as high school students. Of a Hyunjin and Seungmin that one without the other was like _gamjatang_ without the soup, or Pororo without the helmet and goggles.

Hyunjin stops walking. Seungmin stops walking. “Hyunjinnie?” Seungmin asks, voice soft but just loud enough to be heard over the whoosh of passing cars. When Hyunjin blinks, they’re at the spot where he’d first told Seungmin _I like you_ back in August, where the summer rain and then the winter snow, along with time, have washed away the physical traces of them.

“You know,” Hyunjin says shakily. He thought he’d cried everything he had in him out during their graduation ceremony, but there’s still the tell-tale pressure burning at the bridge of his nose all the same. “You still owe me a wish for my half-court shot.”

“How could I forget?” Seungmin smiles before his mouth settles into a small line in seriousness. 

Hyunjin takes a deep breath. “I wish,” he starts. “That things won’t change even if you’re at SNU, and I’m in Incheon. That we’ll still be exactly like this.” Hyunjin’s hearing himself cry now, the words coming through between sobs, and every breath he heaves makes it harder. “And that you’ll always love me like this, like you do now. And that I’ll always love you.”

And Seungmin surges forward, wrapping his arms around him, holding him. His tears are warm through the fabric of Hyunjin’s uniform, his own watery breaths pushing against Hyunjin’s chest. Hyunjin never wants him to let go. “Promise me,” he says into Seungmin’s shirt.

“I promise.” There’s tears and a Seungmin-kind of earnestness in those words that Hyunjin would follow anywhere. “I promise.”

And in the heart of winter, a warmth blooms.


End file.
